This research focuses on the booming field of personal and spiritual development programs that are becoming very popular within the emerging middle class from Romania. I analyze the various forms of alternative spiritualities and their embedding in different professional fields in relation to the structural transformation of the labor market taking place in Romania after the financial crisis. My research explores how these personal and spiritual development programs socialize a new type of self that emphasize creativity, resilience and reliance on an interiority that finds in itself all the resources needed to live a happy and productive life. I argue that this generates the proximities for the formation of a radical entrepreneurial subjectivity that is tuned to the recent capitalist transformations of an economic environment centered on competitivity, creative work and flexibility.

Event of The Group for Anthropological Research and Debates (GARD), supported by a grant of the Executive Unit for Financing Higher Education, Research, Development and Innovation – UEFISCDI, project number PN-III-P3-3.6-H2020-2016-0018, within PNCDI III